thailand!

My guidebook says over 90% of Thais are practicing Buddhists. After visiting just a few cities, I'd believe it. You can't go a block without passing a little shrine like this one - even on the busy metropolitan streets of Bangkok.

Once again, before I launch into the details of another crazy weekend, I will start with a few short stories:

1. My teach-the-teacher session is on hold, since our Friday afternoons will now be devoted to learning a kung fu dance that all the teachers will perform together at our New Years' party. This already awkward process is complicated by the fact that I am the only teacher who does not understand Chinese, so no translations of the dance instructions are provided. If you'd like to check out the dance we're learning, you can see it here. Fast-forward to minute 0:50 if you'd like to see how I ripped my pants.
2. Last week during our weather unit, I had my year 2 students make weather forecasts and then record the actual weather every day. As part of this procedure, I asked them to illustrate their forecasts: sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc. When I distributed the colored pencils, they all immediately jumped for the red ones, which turned out to be necessary because that was the color they all chose for their suns. I didn't think much of it until I was walking home in the evening and noticing the blood red sun setting in the sky; because of the polluted haze hanging over Shenzhen, the sun really does appear to be red. No student in America would select a red colored pencil to color a sun, but here that was the unanimous choice. Just another reminder of how different the most ordinary things can be on the opposite side of the globe...
3. I got a new class this week, which meets Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It does make my schedule a bit out of control, but still I can hardly complain: it's an 11th grade class called OSC, "Overseas Chinese," and has 9 Korean + 1 Cambodian students. My co-teacher (the Chinese teacher who teaches the class 3 other periods each week) is the director of students, similar to a Vice Principal of an American school. The kids are already pretty respectful to begin with, but the threat that the woman charged with behavioral discipline - aptly named "Sissy" - will immediately know if they are off task makes them even more well-behaved. And the good news is, with 18 classes/week, I now get paid overtime!

Onto Thailand! After a rough start, it ended up being an amazing and jam-packed 48 hours. Andy and I took a cab to the port in Shekou, Shenzhen, to board a ferry to Hong Kong to catch our flight. Everything went relatively smoothly until we arrived at the ferry terminal in Hong Kong and got ready to check in for our flight: our airline, Air Asia, was nowhere to be found. Worse, no one at the other airline counters had heard of Air Asia, and when we finally got airport management, we were told that we were in the wrong area to check in for Air Asia flights, but there was no way we could get a bus or taxi to take us to the correct terminal. As the time before our flight left became shorter, we realized there was no possibility that we would be on it. To complicate this matter, since we had taken a ferry over - which accepts only cash - we had no way of re-boarding it to return to Shenzhen. I managed to convince myself we would be fine until a member of airport staff took our passports, told us we could sleep in the ferry terminal, and left.

As you may divine by the fact that I have Thailand stories to share, things did work out in the end. We were able to buy last-minute tickets into Bangkok through another airline (for the painful price of US$428 each). In the end I was so relieved just to have my passport and be leaving that dreadful terminal that the monetary value assigned to the ticket was relatively unimportant.

Otherwise, my Thai tales form one long happy weekend. A few of the most memorable moments:

• After arriving in Pattaya around 2 am on Friday/Saturday, we decided that rather than sleep we would go for a walk and check out the city. We ended up watching a crappy American movie with Thai subtitles with a lone bartender, eating street food, and walking in the sand until 5 am. Which of course made the 9 am alarm feel terrific on Saturday morning.
• We rented scooters Saturday morning and went beach-hopping. So I spent the afternoon swimming in the ocean, laying in the sun, ogling the fat European tourists, getting a leg/back/neck massage, and eating wonderful food. One minor blip when I ran over my foot with the moped, but otherwise it was a highlight of the trip.
• Pattaya is known for its wild sex industry. Even after being in red light districts in other cities, the blatant prostitution of women and "ladyboys" was a bit startling...
  
• At a bar on Saturday evening, we were told alcohol was no longer being served. In this bar? In Pattaya? No - in all of Thailand! Apparently the King's sister was being cremated, and the ceremony lasted from 7 am until past 10 pm. It seemed that all of Thailand was glued to their television screens watching the procession, so the country was staying sober for the occasion. Quite the lesson in Thai culture and their allegiance to their principal figurehead, who has been their king for over 60 years. Fun fact: in Thailand, it is illegal to say anything bad about the King. So any sour thoughts we had about the alcohol ban were wisely kept inside.

This beach-side sign shows (a) the importance of the king, (b) the sweet Thai script, and (c) a funny equation of fish + cigarette = fish skeleton.

• Bangkok on Sunday afternoon: Pretty much exactly what I imagined. It's a crazy and disorganized city filled with hawkers selling knock-off goods, tons of amazing food, and Buddhist temples overshadowed by towering skyscrapers. Check out the example on the right - how's that for juxtaposition of cultures?
  

85% chinese

In the past six weeks, I have gotten used to...

• paying in RMB - I no longer convert back to the US dollar (unless I am trying to rationalize a seemingly expensive purchase)
• responding to "Teacher" and "老师" and even "Hamburger"
• speaking slowly and using direct/easy vocabulary
• saying "haiya" (pronounced hi-YAHH) to express frustration. Often.
  
• running on a treadmill that tracks my progress in km - again, the conversion to American units is no longer necessary
  
• biking and running in a city where cars drive on sidewalks while bikes pulling entire truckloads use the road
• eating at a restaurant or street vendor 2, 3, and sometimes 4 times a day
• drinking disgusting canned coffee that tastes suspiciously like the container it comes in
• using chopsticks - even for pasta in my apartment. Can anyone find a fork around here?!
• overseeing my students' morning exercises and eye exercises. Hard to believe how foreign these seemed just a month ago!

8:00 "morning exercises" in the courtyard of the ISS

• living in the tropics - this Minnesota girl even put on a sweater when it got down into the sixties last night
• eating meat with relatively little idea which animal, or part of that animal, it originally belonged to
• my rock hard bed
• being unable to understand the majority of signs and conversation around me
• bartering, sometimes to 1/4 the asking price, for seemingly everyday purchases
• pretending I knew the computer in my classroom wasn't going to work and that I really did intend to play Bingo/hangman/murder mystery/20 questions/charades for the last 15 minutes of class
• unexpected surprises in class at the last moment. Key example from this afternoon: my year 1 class had an extra student, Enson, who is my Year 4 low-level English Corner. He couldn't explain his presence to me with his limited English, but when I asked another teacher later, I found out that he had been "acting like a Year 1 student so today he will be a Year 1 student." This would be the classic degrading punishment, made altogether more degrading by the fact that in our spelling contest, Ben and Coco beat Enson on every single word.

Enson, Ben, and Coco caught in a rare quiet/studious moment

Of course, there are some things I'm still working on: the absolute mess of the Chinese planned-one-day-at-a-time school system; being stared at and photographed endlessly ("外国人!"); and my 7th-9th grade class, who openly state that they have no interest in learning English, and instead belittle each other and me for 40 straight minutes each week (seriously: this week after they left, I locked the door, sat in the empty classroom, and cried). But my assimilation list is growing longer and I am already getting the sense that leaving in February might not actually be all that easy... It's nice to feel at home on the other side of the world.

another one-way ticket

This summer I sent over 20 emails into African cyberspace in search of a volunteer position with an NGO from the spring of 2009. My tagline about a Yale Law student on a one-year deferral must not have been as catchy as I had hoped, because after a few months of dedicated effort I received exactly zero responses. Then, in mid-September - over two months after I had sent the initial correspondence - I heard back from Andrew Youn, a Korean Yale (BA)/Northwestern (MBA) grad who founded One Acre Fund in rural Kenya. He happened to be in Minneapolis on a fundraising run that week, so we arranged a "casual meeting" at a Starbucks downtown the day before I left.

The casual meeting turned out to be a fairly intense hour-long session in which I mapped out business and experiment plans for hypothetical situations faced by the rapidly developing agricultural NGO. I had little background with this type of interview question - although I am told they are quite common in the business world - but apparently I did fine because Andrew told me they would try to find an available niche for me with One Acre Fund for the spring after my teaching contract ends in China.

Between the blog entry title and this little background story, you can probably guess what the latest development in my life has been: Andrew officially extended me an invitation to work with One Acre Fund this spring. However, the terms are less favorable than he had hoped; since I can't get there until February and planting begins March 1, he will have to staff the major projects with employees who can be in Kenya at the beginning of 2009. So while I get free room and board (granted, "free room and board" in a hut with no running water or electricity), I have to pay for travel and immunization expenses. I don't really mind; I sort of expected this from the beginning, and if I were trying to capitalize financially I would not be working in a country where the currency is worth roughly 1/7 of the US dollar!

I should add that even after all my excitement to move to Africa, the decision was not easy - I am feeling increasingly at home in China, understanding more and more Mandarin, and finally learning the ropes of being a teacher. I hate to cut short the happy episodes of my life, but the anticipation I feel thinking about Kenya makes it impossible to turn down this opportunity. Oh yes, and of course I had to take into considering the winning vote from the poll on the right-hand side of my blog... Yes, my loyal readers, your vote does count!